Diamond in the Rough: Wilderness and the Diamond Approach (Full with waiting list)

Step outside your familiar life, be nourished by nature, find the support of community and deep listening, and receive renewal, guidance, and inspiration for your inner journey. Here, wild nature will become a home and a mirror for your true nature.

The Foundations:
This retreat draws together several powerful paths. “Primitive Ecopsychology” opens doorways into the soul through direct encounters with the natural world, and wilderness provides an accessible and powerful way into our souls’ true nature. The Diamond Approach® brings a profound richness, clarity, and depth to the lessons of the wild. The Four Shields teaching provides an inclusive, nonjudgmental map of nature and human nature – body, heart, mind, and spirit. Integrating these paths offers a transformative journey to your sense of inner peace and freedom.

The Diamond Approach incorporates timeless spiritual wisdom and modern psychological insight. Its practice of open and open-ended inquiry leads to the realization of our souls’ essence while helping us work through barriers to this realization. It promotes freedom which is expressed in authentic presence, aliveness, fulfillment, love, and a greater sense of being at home with ourselves.

The School of Lost Borders bases its work on immersion in the natural world, ceremonial ways of relating to the land and ourselves, and a four-fold map of our experience. The School’s forms include vision fasts, rites of passage, and council practice, each of which informs the Diamond in the Rough retreats.

The Retreat:
This wilderness-based retreat brings direct and immediate contact with nature to teachings and practices from the Four Shields and the Diamond Approach. Our tools include experiential inquiry, mindfulness, simple ceremony, council practice, and explorations of nature as teacher, healer, home, and self – all as the basis for deepening intimacy with our true nature.

Most days, we will gather for brief teachings about the Diamond Approach and the Four Shields with most of the day devoted to solo time in nature, a chance to explore these teachings in your own experience and through the lessons of wild nature. In the evening, we will share our unfolding stories. A 24-hour solo provides a chance to deepen into these inquiries and openness.

Our basecamp will be Wild Mountain Ranch near Buena Vista, Colorado, a place of meadows, aspen groves, pine forests, rocky ridges, and extraordinary views, affording us solitude, expanse, and beauty in the Rockies. It is about 3 hours from Denver and Boulder and 2.5 hours from Colorado Springs. We will be able to drive to our basecamp, and you can choose how far to walk on your solos. A gear list and other details for preparation will be sent when you register. A deposit of $250 will hold your space on this retreat.

This retreat is appropriate for those who are new to the Diamond Approach and wilderness camping as well as those who have extensive experience with either of them. Previous wilderness experience is not necessary.

The School of Lost Borders has created a sliding scale for all its fast and trainings in an effort to keep our courses affordable to a wide range of people. We set forth no criteria and trust that each individual will pay what they feel is appropriate.